The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire eBook

A more amusing instance of the spirit of saving is
that told by another narrator, who says that he saw
a lone woman patiently pushing an upright piano along
the pavement a few inches at a time. Evidently
in this case, too, it was the poor soul’s one
great treasure on earth.

He also tells of a guest berating the proprietor of
a hotel, a few minutes after the shock, because he
had not obeyed orders to call him at five o’clock.
He vowed he would never stop at that house again, a
vow he might well keep, as the house is no more.

In one room where two girls were dressing the floor
gave way and one of them disappeared.

“Where are you, Mary?” screamed her companion.

“Oh, I’m in the parlor,” said Mary
calmly, as she wriggled out of the mass of plaster
and mortar below.

At the handsome residence of Rudolph Spreckels, the
wealthy financier, the lawn was riven from end to
end in great gashes, while the ornamental Italian
rail leading to the imposing entrance was a battered
heap. But the family, with a philosophy notable
for the occasion, calmly set up housekeeping on the
sidewalk, the women seated in armchairs taken from
the mansion and wrapped in rugs and coverlets, the
silver breakfast service was laid out on the stone
coping and their morning meal spread out on the sidewalk.
This, scene was repeated at other houses of the wealthy,
the families too fearful of another shock to venture
within doors.

Another story of much interest in this connection
is told. On Friday afternoon, two days and some
hours after the scene just narrated, Mrs. Rudolph
Spreckels presented her husband with an heir on the
lawn in front of their mansion, while the family were
awaiting the coming of the dynamite squad to blow
up their magnificent residence. An Irish woman
who had been called in to play the part of midwife
at a birth elsewhere on Saturday, made a pertinent
comment after the wee one’s eyes were opened
to the walls of its tent home.

“God sends earthquakes and babies,” she
said, “but He might, in His mercy, cut out sending
them both together.”

There were many pathetic incidents. Families
had been sadly separated in the confusion of the flight.
Husbands had lost their wives—­wives had
lost their husbands, and anxious mothers sought some
word of their children—­the stories were
very much the same. One pretty looking woman
in an expensive tailor-made costume badly torn, had
lost her little girl.

“I don’t think anything has happened to
her,” said she, hopefully. “She is
almost eleven years old, and some one will be sure
to take her in and care for her; I only want to know
where she is. That is all I care about now.”

A well-known young lady of good social position, when
asked where she had spent the night, replied:
“On a grave.”

“I thank God, I thank Uncle Sam and the people
of this nation,” said a woman, clad in a red
woolen wrapper, seated in front of a tent at the Presidio
nursing one child and feeding three others from a board
propped on two bricks. “We have lost our
home and all we had, but we have never been hungry
nor without shelter.”